at his own
fireside, with the immediate recognition, appreciation, and enthusiasm
so necessary to an artist, and which he so seldom finds among his own
blood or in his own family.

[Footnote 76: Now Mrs. Salisbury Field.]

"After Stevenson disappeared in the South Seas, many of us had a new
feeling about that part of the world. I remember that on my next trip
to California I looked at the Pacific with new eyes; there was a
glamour of romance over it. I always intended to go to Samoa to visit
him; it was one of those splendid adventures that one might have had
and did not.

"One afternoon in August, 1896, I went with Sidney Colvin and Mrs.
Sitwell (now Lady Colvin) to Paddington Station to meet Mrs.
Stevenson, when, after Stevenson's death she at last returned to
Europe after her world-wide wanderings--after nine years of exile.
When she alighted from the boat train I felt Stevenson's death as if
it had happened only the day before, and I have no doubt that she did.
As she came up the platform in black, with so much that was strange
and wonderful behind her, his companion of so many years, through
uncharted seas and distant lands, I could only say to myself:
'Hector's Andromache!'"[77]

[Footnote 77: Quoted from _McClure's Magazine_.]

She had one of those unusual personalities that attract other women as
well as men, and one of them, Lady Balfour, writes of her from the
point of view of her own sex:

"When Mrs. Stevenson heard of my engagement to Graham Balfour she
wrote me the kindest and tenderest of letters, telling me not to have
any fears in the new path that lay before me. She added: 'I who tell
you so have trodden it from end to end.' This sympathy meant much to
me, for it could only have come from such a generous heart as hers.
She had hoped that Palema[78] would continue to make his home with
them, and she had great confidence in and love for him. He would have
been a link between her and the old associations of the Vailima life,
and his engagement to an English girl proved to her that this would no
longer be possible. Yet where a less fine nature would have contented
itself with the mere formal congratulations as all that could be
possible under the circumstances, she gave generous sympathy to a
stranger, who caused her fresh loss, from her generous 'steel-true'
heart.

[Footnote 78: Sir Graham Balfour's Samoan name.]

"I had been married about two years whe